Pint (pt)

20 fluid ounces. The iconic pub baseline fluid measure for British draught beer.

The imperial pint is 568.26 millilitres, being 20 fluid ounces, and it is the only unit in this archive that carries criminal penalties. Draught beer and cider in a British pub must be sold in pints, halves or thirds, in vessels bearing either a crown stamp or the European CE mark, and selling a short pint is an offence prosecuted by trading standards to this day. That list gained a fourth member in 2011, when the Specified Quantities Order added the schooner at two thirds of a pint, making it the only British beer measure ever created rather than abolished. The American pint is 16 fluid ounces, about 473 millilitres, because the United States kept the older Queen Anne wine gallon when Britain abolished it in 1824. So a British pint is nearly a fifth larger, and both nations subdivide their own pint identically: the pints themselves simply differ. Milk in returnable glass bottles remains one of the few other goods still legally sold by the pint, which is why the doorstep pint outlived almost every other imperial retail measure.